The same idea applies to land surveys when you’re building a $1.8 million home.

You may want to double and even triple check your land survey, in fact, because you can't build on protected parkland.

A developer who mistakenly built a $1.8 million waterfront house on parkland has been ordered to remove it.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court found that the unoccupied home in Narragansett was built entirely on land owned by the Rose Nulman Park Foundation, and therefore must be removed.

The developer, Four Twenty Corp., began building the home in 2009, but it didn't discover the error until 2011 when it tried to sell the house and the prospective buyers got a survey. Robert Lamoureux, who owns the company, then contacted one of the park's trustees to try to work something out, but she told him the land was not for sale, according to Friday's opinion.

The foundation was set up to preserve the property as a park in perpetuity. A 2008 agreement among the family members says that if the trustees allow the land to be used as anything other than a public park, they must pay $1.5 million to New York Presbyterian Hospital.

The developer argued it should not be penalized for an innocent surveying mistake. The court said it was sympathetic, but it said the park's property rights outweighed that. It also said it was in the public's interest to keep the land as a park.

Trey Garrison is the Senior Financial Reporter for HousingWire.com. Trey has served as real estate editor for the Dallas Business Journal, and was one of the founding editors of D CEO Magazine. He has been an editor for D Magazine — considered among the best city magazines in the United States — and a contributor for Reason magazine.

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